How gently though the phone screen doth thou hold my love? Can the 6 inches of this cyber home hold the weight of my heart? A digital age necessitates new virtual passions.  Time passes in the chat log and we find our past warmth frozen in words where chat bubbles left off. When final words have been typed and all that lingers is a ghost, where do I bury a body lost within a screen? 

The technological advances of the 21st century have metamorphosed the way we form relationships in the absence of their physical presence. Where yearning takes on a new shape, we are left to mourn the loss of lovers in ways never before. The presence of a lover in a notification and a text, the absence of them in a faceless blocked account, the rejection of biting text or a message left on read and the little piece of soul that is a screenshot of our deepest shared secrets, each is felt with a gravity like they were here right beside us. In lieu of a warm body next to ours, we build monuments to our passion in pixels, love letters and farewells forever enshrined in flashes of a screen.

XOXO, My Cyberlove brings to our physical world the love and losses that live in cyber realms. The artists in this show narrate the online relationships we form in delicate, love-laced materials of paint and thread, crayons and crochet; crafting with their two hands the fantastical, heart-aching worlds that live between the spaces of 0’s and 1’s. This show bears witness and gives physical forms to the humble pinings and laments of a heart broken through the phone. Here, encoded, is how to navigate joy and absence, presence and grief, when ‘to have and to hold’ lives in the 6 inches of a screen.